Healing is what happens when Pastoral Practitioners minister, enabling people to receive restoration to health of body and mind through God's great love and mercy. This restoration of health is part of what is meant by the "abundant life" which the Lord promised.

You're not going to believe this one: A recent poll of 1500 women in Britain and five other countries found that 22 percent of them would consider having both breasts removed if they were at high risk for breast cancer. We're not talking about the removal of breasts that have cancer; we're talking about the removal of both breasts, a double mastectomy, as a prevention strategy -- even without a diagnosis of cancer. Amazingly, one out of five women said yes.

Now, wait a minute. Let's get a hold of our senses for a second here. If you went to a group of women and said, "Your mother died of breast cancer. Therefore, we are going to take a scalpel and physically slice off both of your breasts just on the off-chance that we might be able to prevent breast cancer in you" -- are you telling me that 22 percent of those women would say yes? How insane is that?

This is a case in which you can't just blame the medical community. Of course, they're evidently practicing medical insanity in suggesting such a drastic "preventative" measure, but you can't really blame the surgeons here -- you have to blame the 22 percent who said yes. What is wrong with these women that they would blindly say, "Yeah, sure, cut them off. I might have cancer some day, so just remove all the parts that could become cancerous." What do you do if you're a guy and you have a history of prostate cancer? What if you have a family history of colon cancer, lung cancer or liver cancer? Do you just take those organs out? Is this what conventional medicine has come down to? Let's remove the parts that might become diseased! Is this how far off the deep end modern medicine has gone?

What happened to true prevention? What happened to helping patients heal? What happened to conserving and supporting the health of one's organs? What happened to keeping one's breasts healthy so that you don't have to cut anything out for the sake of preventing cancer down the road? What happened to that kind of thinking? I mean, isn't medicine based on, "First, do no harm"? Isn't that the opening line of the Hippocratic Oath? Aren't doctors supposed to be helping patients, not slicing them up? "Doctor, my arm hurts." "Don't worry, we can remove it." Is that what medicine has come to?

Women in the UK were even more likely to say yes
Here's another interesting fact to all of this -- this will be especially disconcerting to those of you in the UK. Thirty-one percent of women from the UK said yes in this survey, compared to 22 percent overall. Now, I know that in the UK you like to think of Americans as being mad, and you're 51% right. But in this case, it's the British who are crazy to the tune of one-third of their female population saying yes to this. "Sure, doc. Cut them off. I don't need these. I'm preventing breast cancer."

Now, does all of this remind anybody else of Bush's war on Iraq and its so-called "preemptive defense?" Maybe medicine could call this "offensive prevention." They'll prevent a disease before it happens by removing the organs that it might affect. God forbid if you have a history of brain tumors in your family -- off with your head! That's their plan; that's where they're taking medicine. That's the level of insanity that seems to be pervading the thinking of medical authorities out there. Give a doctor a scalpel and he wants to cut off everything in sight.

Let's get real about breast cancer
Despite the insanity of conventional medicine, you nonetheless can deal with breast cancer in a rational way. You can treat it and overcome it. You can even reverse it with natural medicine. It's not that difficult to do, really. In all truthfulness, cancer is one of the easiest diseases to reverse with natural medicine. I'm talking about medicinal herbs, reishi mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, outstanding nutrition (see related ebook on nutrition) and avoidance of certain food ingredients and environmental toxins such as plastic cookware -- measures like that. It's not overly difficult to reverse this disease or even prevent it from happening in the first place, but what modern medicine wants to do is take away your organs.

When they're not removing your organs, they're irradiating them: "Let's smash your breasts between this machine like a pancake and irradiate them to see if we can find some tumors in there." That's what they call a mammogram. They refer to it as prevention -- preventing cancer by irradiating your breast, which makes about as much sense as treating diabetes by giving you sugar. How is that prevention? How can that even be classified as medicine?

A mammogram is not a preventative technique; it is a diagnostic technique for detection, and it's not even very effective. Even worse, it causes cancer. That's right: the radiation emitted by these mammogram machines is, all by itself, a significant cause of breast cancer. (And many of these machines are not properly calibrated to begin with, so even the radiologist may not know how much radiation you're actually getting...) See the Mammograms cause breast cancer article to learn more.

So mammograms are touted as "prevention", and we now have all these celebrities running around urging everyone, "Go get screened for cancer! Come on, rush on in there! Put yourself in the machine, get irradiated and find out if you have a cancerous tumor in there."

So, let me pose a question: If the double mastectomy becomes an accepted prevention procedure, would celebrities recommend that women go in and have their breasts removed? Imagine this public service announcement: "Hi, I'm a famous actress. I have my breasts, but I don't think it's safe for you to have yours. Go in and get them removed. It's good medicine; it will prevent breast cancer." Is that what we're heading toward?

I'm not making this up
I sometimes receive emails from people who think that I'm making this stuff up. They say, "Mike, you've lost it this time. You're just making this up. Modern medicine couldn't be that crazy." Unfortunately, I can assure you I'm not making this up. You can verify for yourself: Go to Google News or any search engine you want and search for the keywords "double mastectomy breast cancer prevention." The Times of London did this report, so you can check it out yourself.

I am not making this stuff up, folks. In fact, I couldn't possibly make this type of stuff up; it is much too bizarre to pop into my head. I'm busy thinking about other things, like "How are those tomato plants doing today in the back yard? I wonder if the soil is acidic enough to support the growth of this blueberry plant? I would sure like to have some fresh blueberries this year." Those are the thoughts that occur to me in the normal course of things. I certainly don't think, "Hmm, maybe we could prevent cancer in the world by removing all the organs that could be afflicted by cancer. Yes!" It's a mad scientist kind of thought: "Take the breasts off. Take the organs out of everybody." But that's what is going through the heads of the doctors, scientists and medical authorities who are suggesting this kind of thing. It's truly scary and downright insane; yet, it passes as organized medicine. Pretty soon, they'll start making women feel guilty for keeping their breasts. You know, in the same way they make parents feel guilty if they don't put their kids on Ritalin.

Defend your natural-born breasts
I know that most of the readers here are women and I just have some advice that I'd like to pass on to you. You can accept or refuse it, but my advice is that you should not remove your breasts. Keep them right where they are; don't let any surgeon near them. Who knows what they want to do?

Live your life in a healthy, happy way and stay away from these insane surgeons with scalpels and mad ideas about removing organs that might someday have cancer. I mean, think about it: They want to take a perfectly healthy piece of tissue off of your body. There's not even any disease in it, but they'd still like to take it.

That's insane! It's like saying, "You might have foot disease someday -- let's take the foot off." Wouldn't you normally wait for something to actually be diseased before you chop it off? There are a lot of amputations in this country for diabetics. They get gangrene because they have diabetic neuropathy and eventually they don't have active nerve endings in their limbs any more. In fact, the majority of amputations in this country are due to diabetes, but at least there's a point beyond which they can justify it. They can say, "This leg isn't going to make it. You can't feel it, you can't move it, and it's getting infected." In such a case, an amputation is medically justified. But let's say that they said, "You're diabetic? Hmm, I think we should take your legs now before they get infected as a preventative measure" -- that's what they're saying about breast cancer. "Take them off now to prevent breast cancer."

They're going to use fear, of course, saying, "We'll be saving your life by taking these off! You could very well save your life down the road. You want to save your life, don't you?" Then they say, "Don't listen to those internet people. They don't know what they're talking about; they don't have a medical degree. What do they know about breast cancer? We have to remove these now. You cannot wait! If you remove your breasts now, you might live six to twelve months; otherwise, you'll only live one to three months." They'll use that kind of language on you to scare you into submitting to their surgical procedures.

This is strange medicine. These are strange days, folks. And this, it appears, is just one of many strange (but true) stories I'll be bringing to your attention. So stay tuned for more.